Friday November 13, 2009

If you share a file system using the CIFS server (not SAMBA) and create a file in that file system using Windows XP the file ends up with these strange permissions and an ACL like this:

: pearson FSS 12 $; ls -vd Bad
d---------+  2 cjg      staff          2 Nov 13 17:11 Bad
     0:user:cjg:list_directory/read_data/add_file/write_data/add_subdirectory
         /append_data/read_xattr/write_xattr/execute/delete_child
         /read_attributes/write_attributes/delete/read_acl/write_acl
         /write_owner/synchronize:allow
     1:group:2147483648:list_directory/read_data/add_file/write_data

         /add_subdirectory/append_data/read_xattr/write_xattr/execute

         /delete_child/read_attributes/write_attributes/delete/read_acl

         /write_acl/write_owner/synchronize:allow

: pearson FSS 13 $; 

The first thing that riles UNIX some users is the lack of any file permissions, although things seem to work fine. The strange group ACL is for the local WINDOWS SYSTEM group. However the odd thing is for me it renders iTunes on the Windows system unable to see the files that it has created.

The solution is to add a default ACL to the root of the file system (well to every object in the file system if the file system is not new) that looks like this:

A+owner@:full_set:fd:allow,everyone@:read_set/execute:fd:allow

So this has the rather pleasant side effect of setting the UNIX permissions to something more recognisable:

: pearson FSS 20 $; ls -vd Good
drwxr-xr-x+  2 cjg      staff          2 Nov 13 18:16 Good
     0:owner@:list_directory/read_data/add_file/write_data/add_subdirectory
         /append_data/read_xattr/write_xattr/execute/delete_child
         /read_attributes/write_attributes/delete/read_acl/write_acl
         /write_owner/synchronize:file_inherit/dir_inherit/inherited:allow
     1:everyone@:list_directory/read_data/read_xattr/execute/read_attributes
         /read_acl:file_inherit/dir_inherit/inherited:allow
: pearson FSS 21 $; 

and the even more pleasant side effect of making iTunes works again!

Thursday November 12, 2009

I've said many times that dtrace is not just a wonderful tool for developers and performance gurus. The Kings of Computing, which are of course System Admins, also find it really useful.

There is an ancient version of make called Parallel make that occasionally suffers from a bug (1223984) where it gets into a loop like this:

waitid(P_ALL, 0, 0x08047270, WEXITED|WTRAPPED)	Err#10 ECHILD
alarm(0)					= 30
alarm(30)					= 0
waitid(P_ALL, 0, 0x08047270, WEXITED|WTRAPPED)	Err#10 ECHILD
alarm(0)					= 30
alarm(30)					= 0
waitid(P_ALL, 0, 0x08047270, WEXITED|WTRAPPED)	Err#10 ECHILD

This will then consume a CPU and the users CPU shares. The application is never going to be fixed so the normal advice is not to use it. However since it can be NFS mounted from anywhere I can't reliably delete all copies of it so occasionally we will see run away processes on our build server.

It turns out this is a snip to fix with dtrace. Simply look for cases where the wait system call returns an error and errno is set to ECHILD (10) and if that happens 10 times in a row for the same process and that process does not call fork then stop the process.

The script is simple enough for me to just do it on the command line:

# dtrace -wn 'syscall::waitsys:return / arg1 <= 0 && 
execname == "make.bin" && errno == 10  && waitcount[pid]++ > 20 / {

	stop();

	printf("uid %d pid %d", uid, pid) }

syscall::forksys:return / arg1 > 0 / { waitcount[pid] = 0 }'
dtrace: description 'syscall::waitsys:return ' matched 2 probes
dtrace: allowing destructive actions
CPU     ID                    FUNCTION:NAME
  2  20588                   waitsys:return uid 36580 pid 29252
  3  20588                   waitsys:return uid 36580 pid 2522
  5  20588                   waitsys:return uid 36580 pid 28663
  7  20588                   waitsys:return uid 36580 pid 29884
 10  20588                   waitsys:return uid 36580 pid 941
 15  20588                   waitsys:return uid 36580 pid 1098

This was way easier then messing around with prstat, truss and pstop!

Sunday November 08, 2009

At the request of the users the access hours for Sun Ray users in the house have been relaxed so that on Friday and Saturday nights the Sun Ray's in bedrooms can be used later.

This required that the access hour script be updated to understand the day of the week and hence the access_hour file also is updated in an incompatible way. There is now an extra column representing the days of the week when the rule is applied as the first column after the name of the user. The day of the week field will take a wild card '*' or ranges (1-5) for Monday to Friday, or lists (1,3,5). Sunday is day 0 as any self respecting geek would have it.

The new access_file I have looks something like this:

user0:0-4:0001:2300:P8.00144f7dc383

user2:0-4:0630:2300

user3:0-4:0630:2230

user4:0-4:0630:2100

user4:5-6:0630:2200

The script is still here: http://blogs.sun.com/chrisg/resource/check_access_hours

Friday October 09, 2009

Since the "nevada" builds of Solaris next are due to end soon and for some time the upgrade of my home server has involved more than a little bit of TLC to get it to work I will be moving to an OpenSolaris build just as soon as I can.

However before I can do this I need to make sure I have all thesoftware to provide home service. This is really a note to myself to I don't forget anything.

• Exim Mail Transfer Agent (MTA). Since I am using certain encryption routines, virus detection and spamassassin I was unable to use the standard MTA, sendmail, when the system was originaly built and have been using exim, from blastwave. I hope to build and use exim without getting all the cruft that comes from the Blastwave packaged. So far this looks like it will be simple as OpenSolaris now has OpenSSL.

• An imapd. Currently I have a blastwave version but again I intend to build this from scratch again the addition of OpenSSL and libcrypto should make this easy.

• Clamav. To protect any Windows systems and to generally not pass on viri to others clamav has been scanning all incoming email. Again I will build this from scratch as I already do.

• Spamassassin. Again I already build this for nevada so building it for OpenSolaris will be easy.

• Ddclient. Having dynamic DNS allows me to login remotely and read email.

• Squeezecenter. This is a big issue and in the past has proved hard to get built thanks to all the perl dependacies. It is for that reason I will continue to run it in a zone so that I don't have to trash the main system. Clearly with all my digital music loaded into the squeezecentre software this has to work.

I'm going to see if I can jump through the legal hoops that will allow me to contribute the builds to the contrib repository via Source Juicer. However as this is my spare time I don't know whether the legal reviews will be funded.

Due to the way OpenSolaris is delivered I also need to be more careful about what I install. rather than being able to choose everything. First I need my list from my laptop. Then in addtion to that I'll need

• Samba - pkg:/SUNWsmba

• cups - pkg:/SUNWcups

• OpenSSL - pkg:/SUNWopenssl

Oh and I'll need the Sun Ray server software.

Wednesday September 23, 2009

I've finally worked out how to drive purple-url-handler. Strictly John worked it out, so I will stand on his shoulders, but for some reason it would not work for me and I now know why and have a workaround.

First you need an XMPP URI on a web page. Some thing like:

xmpp:chrisg_fans@muc.im.sun.com?join

will when clicked in a browser that has the right helper, something OpenSolaris has had for some time, will take your IM client to that room. However with pidgin that is only the case if that room is available in the first XMPP server listed in your list of accounts. So given that this room is on Sun's IM server with the list of accounts looking like this:

It will try and connect to the first XMPP server listed, which is google and hence fail. Changing the order to be:

and then logging in and out and now the link will work. You can drag and drip the entries in pidgin.

Tuesday September 15, 2009

Today I took the plunge and moved from working on our Nevada based Sun Ray Servers to one running OpenSolaris. So that I could get the full OpenSolaris look and feel I first purged my home directory of a number of configuration files and directories using a script like¹ this:

#!/bin/ksh -p
TARGET=b4OpenSolaris
test -d $HOME/$TARGET || mkdir $HOME/$TARGET
mv $HOME/.ICEauthority $HOME/$TARGET
mv $HOME/.cache $HOME/$TARGET
mv $HOME/.chewing $HOME/$TARGET
mv $HOME/.config $HOME/$TARGET
mv $HOME/.dbus $HOME/$TARGET
mv $HOME/.dmrc $HOME/$TARGET
mv $HOME/.gconf $HOME/$TARGET
mv $HOME/.gconfd $HOME/$TARGET
mv $HOME/.gksu.lock $HOME/$TARGET
mv $HOME/.gnome2 $HOME/$TARGET
mv $HOME/.gnome2_private $HOME/$TARGET
mv $HOME/.gstreamer-0.10 $HOME/$TARGET
mv $HOME/.gtk-bookmarks $HOME/$TARGET
mv $HOME/.iiim $HOME/$TARGET
mv $HOME/.local $HOME/$TARGET
mv $HOME/.nautilus $HOME/$TARGET
mv $HOME/.printer-groups.xml $HOME/$TARGET
mv $HOME/.rnd $HOME/$TARGET
mv $HOME/.sunstudio $HOME/$TARGET
mv $HOME/.sunw $HOME/$TARGET
mv $HOME/.updatemanager $HOME/$TARGET
mv $HOME/.xesam $HOME/$TARGET
mv $HOME/.xsession-errors $HOME/$TARGET

I generated the list by installing OpenSolaris in a VirtualBox and then logging in and doing a bit of browsing and general usage and then seeing was was created. Additionally “.mozilla” was created but I chose to retain that so that I can keep all the history that is in my browser.

Once logged in I have removed the update-manager icon as I am not the administrator. I have also removed the power notification and network monitor as they provide no useful data on a Sun Ray server.

Using “System->Preferences->Startup Applications” I unchecked the codeina update notifier and added my script for updating my IM status.

So far so good but it is taking a while to get used to the menu being a the top and the window list at the bottom of the screen.

Thursday September 10, 2009

Some of the most common failures that result in customer calls are misuses of the memory allocation routines, malloc, calloc, realloc, valloc, memalign and free. There are many ways in which you can misuse these routines and the data that they return and the resulting failures often occur within the routines even though the problem is with the calling program.

I'm not going to discuss here all the ways you can abuse these routines but look at a particular type abuse. The double free. When you allocate memory using these routines it is your responsibility to free it again so that the memory does not “leak”. However you must only free the memory once. Freeing it more than once is a bug and the results of that are undefined.

This very simple code has a double free:

#include <stdlib.h>

void
doit(int n, char *x)
{
        if (n-- == 0)
                free(x);
        else
                doit(n,x);
}
int
main(int argc, char **argv)
{
        char *x;
        char *y;

        x = malloc(100000);
        
        doit(3, x);
        doit(10, x);
}

and if you compile and run that program all appears well;

However a more realistic program could go on to fail in interesting ways leaving you with the difficult task of finding the culprit. It is for that reason the libumem has good checking for double frees:

: exdev.eu FSS 26 $;  LD_PRELOAD=libumem.so.1 /home/cg13442/lang/c/double_free
Abort(coredump)
: exdev.eu FSS 27 $; mdb core
Loading modules: [ libumem.so.1 libc.so.1 ld.so.1 ]
> ::status
debugging core file of double_free (64-bit) from exdev
file: /home/cg13442/lang/c/double_free
initial argv: /home/cg13442/lang/c/double_free
threading model: native threads
status: process terminated by SIGABRT (Abort), pid=18108 uid=14442 code=-1
> ::umem_status
Status:         ready and active
Concurrency:    16
Logs:           (inactive)
Message buffer:
free(e53650): double-free or invalid buffer
stack trace:
libumem.so.1'umem_err_recoverable+0xa6
libumem.so.1'process_free+0x17e
libumem.so.1'free+0x16
double_free'doit+0x3a
double_free'doit+0x4d
double_free'doit+0x4d
double_free'doit+0x4d
double_free'doit+0x4d
double_free'doit+0x4d
double_free'doit+0x4d
double_free'doit+0x4d
double_free'doit+0x4d
double_free'doit+0x4d
double_free'doit+0x4d
double_free'main+0x100
double_free'_start+0x6c

> 

Good though this is there are situations when libumem is not used and others where it can't be used¹. In those cases it is useful to be able to use dtrace to do this and any way it is always nice to have more than one arrow in your quiver:

: exdev.eu FSS 54 $; me/cg13442/lang/c/double_free 2> /dev/null              <
/usr/sbin/dtrace -qs doublefree.d -c /home/cg13442/lang/c/double_free 2> /dev/null
Hit Control-C to stop tracing
double free?
	Address: 0xe53650
	Previous free at: 2009 Jun 23 12:23:22, LWP -1
	This     free at: 2009 Jun 23 12:23:22, LWP -1
	Frees 42663 nsec apart
	Allocated 64474 nsec ago by LWP -1

              libumem.so.1`free
              double_free`doit+0x3a
              double_free`doit+0x4d
              double_free`doit+0x4d
              double_free`doit+0x4d
              double_free`doit+0x4d
              double_free`doit+0x4d
              double_free`doit+0x4d
              double_free`doit+0x4d
              double_free`doit+0x4d

: exdev.eu FSS 56 $; 

If run as root you can get the the real LWP values that did the allocation and the frees:

: exdev.eu FSS 63 $; pfexec /usr/sbin/dtrace -qs doublefree.d -c /home/cg1344>
Hit Control-C to stop tracing
double free?
	Address: 0xe53650
	Previous free at: 2009 Jun 23 14:21:29, LWP 1
	This     free at: 2009 Jun 23 14:21:29, LWP 1
	Frees 27543 nsec apart
	Allocated 39366 nsec ago by LWP 1

              libumem.so.1`free
              double_free`doit+0x3a
              double_free`doit+0x4d
              double_free`doit+0x4d
              double_free`doit+0x4d
              double_free`doit+0x4d
              double_free`doit+0x4d
              double_free`doit+0x4d
              double_free`doit+0x4d
              double_free`doit+0x4d

: exdev.eu FSS 64 $;

Here is the script in all it's glory.

#!/usr/sbin/dtrace -qs

BEGIN
{
	printf("Hit Control-C to stop tracing\n");
}
ERROR 
/ arg4 == DTRACEFLT_KPRIV || arg4 == DTRACEFLT_UPRIV /
{
	lwp = -1;
}

pid$target::realloc:entry,
pid$target::free:entry
{
	self->addr = arg0;
	self->recurse++;
}

pid$target::realloc:return,
pid$target::free:return
/ self->recurse /
{
	self->recurse--;
	self->addr = 0;
}

pid$target::malloc:entry,
pid$target::memalign:entry,
pid$target::valloc:entry,
pid$target::calloc:entry,
pid$target::realloc:entry,
pid$target::realloc:entry,
pid$target::free:entry
/ lwp != -1 && self->lwp == 0 /
{
	self->lwp = curlwpsinfo->pr_lwpid;
}

pid$target::malloc:entry,
pid$target::calloc:entry,
pid$target::realloc:entry,
pid$target::memalign:entry,
pid$target::valloc:entry,
pid$target::free:entry
/ self->lwp == 0 /
{
	self->lwp = lwp;
}

pid$target::malloc:return,
pid$target::calloc:return,
pid$target::realloc:return,
pid$target::memalign:return,
pid$target::valloc:return
{
	alloc_time[arg1] = timestamp;
	allocated[arg1] = 1;
	free_walltime[arg1] = 0LL;
	free_time[arg1] = 0LL;
	free_lwpid[arg1] = 0;
	alloc_lwpid[arg1] = self->lwp;
	self->lwp = 0;
}

pid$target::realloc:entry,
pid$target::free:entry
/ self->recurse == 1 && alloc_time[arg0] && allocated[arg0] == 0 /
{
	printf("double free?\n");
	printf("\tAddress: 0x%p\n", arg0);
	printf("\tPrevious free at: %Y, LWP %d\n", free_walltime[arg0],
		free_lwpid[arg0]);
	printf("\tThis     free at: %Y, LWP %d\n", walltimestamp,
		self->lwp);
	printf("\tFrees %d nsec apart\n", timestamp - free_time[arg0]);
	printf("\tAllocated %d nsec ago by LWP %d\n",
		timestamp - alloc_time[arg0], alloc_lwpid[arg0]);

	ustack(10);
}

pid$target::realloc:entry,
pid$target::free:entry
/ self->recurse == 1 && alloc_time[arg0] && allocated[arg0] == 1 /
{
	free_walltime[arg0] = walltimestamp;
	free_time[arg0] = timestamp;
	free_lwpid[arg0] = self->lwp;

	allocated[arg0] = 0;
}

pid$target::free:entry
/self->lwp && self->recurse == 0/
{
	self->lwp = 0;
}

Wednesday September 09, 2009

¹Iostat has been around for years and until Dtrace came along and allowed us to look more deeply into the kernel was the tool for analysing how the io subsystem was working in Solaris. However interpreting the output has proved in the past to cause problems.

First if you are looking at latency issues it is vital that you use the smallest time quantum to iostat you can, which as of Solaris 10 is 1 second. Here is a sample of some output produced from “iostat -x 1”:

                  extended device statistics                 
device    r/s    w/s   kr/s   kw/s wait actv  svc_t  %w  %b 
sd3       0.0    0.0    0.0    0.0  0.0  0.0    0.0   0   0 
                 extended device statistics                 
device    r/s    w/s   kr/s   kw/s wait actv  svc_t  %w  %b 
sd3       5.0 1026.5    1.6 1024.5  0.0 25.6   24.8   0  23 
                 extended device statistics                 
device    r/s    w/s   kr/s   kw/s wait actv  svc_t  %w  %b 
sd3       0.0    0.0    0.0    0.0  0.0  0.0    0.0   0   0 

The first thing to draw your attention to is the Column “%b” which the manual tells you is:

%b percent of time the disk is busy (transactions in progress)

So in this example the disk was “busy”, ie had at least one transaction (command) in progress for 23% of the time period. Ie 0.23 seconds as the time period was 1 second.

Now look at the “actv” column. Again the manual says:

actv average number of transactions actively being serviced (removed from the queue but not yet completed)

This is the number of I/O operations accepted, but not yet serviced, by the device.

In this example the average number of transactions outstanding for this time quantum was 25.6. Now here is the bit that is so often missed. Since we know that all the transactions actually took place within 0.23 seconds and were not evenly spread across the full second the average queue depth when busy was 100/23 * 25.6 or 111.3. Thanks to dtrace and this D script you can see the actual IO pattern²:

Even having done the maths iostat smooths out peaks in the IO pattern and thus under reports the peak number of transactions as 103.0 when the true value is 200.

The same is true for the bandwidth. The iostat above comes reports 1031.5 transactions a second (r/s + w/s) again though this does not take into account that all those IO requests happened in 0.23 seconds. So the true figure for the device would be 1031.5 * 100/23 which is 4485 transations/sec.

If we up the load on the disk a bit then you can conclude more from the iostat:

device    r/s    w/s   kr/s   kw/s wait actv  svc_t  %w  %b 
sd3       0.0    0.0    0.0    0.0  0.0  0.0    0.0   0   0 
                 extended device statistics                 
device    r/s    w/s   kr/s   kw/s wait actv  svc_t  %w  %b 
sd3       5.0 2155.7    1.6 2153.7 30.2 93.3   57.1  29  45 
                 extended device statistics                 
device    r/s    w/s   kr/s   kw/s wait actv  svc_t  %w  %b 
sd3       0.0 3989.1    0.0 3989.1 44.6 157.2   50.6  41  83 
                 extended device statistics                 
device    r/s    w/s   kr/s   kw/s wait actv  svc_t  %w  %b 
sd3       0.0    0.0    0.0    0.0  0.0  0.0    0.0   0   0 

Since the %w column is non zero, and from the manual %w is:

%w percent of time there are transactions waiting for service (queue non-empty)

This is telling us that the device's active queue was full. So on the third line of the above output the devices queue was full for 0.41 seconds. Since the queue depth is quite easy to find out³ and in this case was 256, you can deduce that the queue depth for that 0.41 seconds was 256. Thus the average for the 0.59 seconds left was (157.2-(0.41*256))/0.59 which is 88.5. The graph of the dtrace results tells a different story:

These examples demonstrate what can happen if your application dumps a large number of transactions onto a storage device while the through put will be fine and if you look at iostat data things can appear ok if the granularity of the samples is not close to your requirement for latency any problem can be hidden by the statistical nature of iostat.

Monday September 07, 2009

What do you do if you manage to delete or corrupt /etc/name_to_major? Assuming you don't have a backup a ZFS snapshot or an alternative boot environment, in which case you probably are in the wrong job, you would appear to be in trouble.

First thing is not to panic. Do not reboot the system. If you do that it won't boot and your day has just got a whole lot worse. The data needed to rebuild /etc/name_to_major is in the running kernel so it can be rebuilt from that. If your system an x86 system it is also in the boot archive.

However if you have no boot archive or have over written it with the bad name_to_system this script will extract it from the kernel, all be it slowly:

#!/bin/ksh
i=0
while ((i < 1000 ))
do
print "0t$i::major2name" | mdb -k | read x && echo $x $i
let i=i+1 
done

¹Redirect that into a file then move the remains of your /etc/name_to_major out of the way and copy the file in place.

Next time make sure you have a back up or snapshot or alternative boot environment!

Sunday September 06, 2009

My winter bike is ready for another dose of rain and darkness. This year I have a new headlight the 2.4W Schmidt Edelux. A single LED that throws out more light that my old 12V set up. The old Lumitec Oval Plus sensor failed at the end of last winter such that the only part that still worked was the lamp. Neither the sensor or the swith would turn it off and the standlight also failed. While I don't hold much store in a forward standlights having so many it was only time before the light really failed. Something I can't really risk.

So I have joined the 21^st century and have an LED. I've only test ridden it up and down the road, which has street lights, so does not really do it justice but it was very impressive. Like the Oval Plus sensor it comes on automatically and has a manual override.

Unlike the Oval Plus the switch is well protected being a reed switch operated by a magnet so there is no way for water to get inside and like all Schmidt lights it has a 5 year warranty and looks fantasitc.

It is powered by the SON hub generator and also swithes the rear light.

Photo by Robyn Gerhard

Thursday September 03, 2009

Editing sd.conf has always been somewhat difficult thanks to it not being a documented interface and that the interface was never inteded to be exposed and it was even architecture specific. Fortunately Micheal documented it, which meant that it was known even if syntax remained obscure.

However after ARC case 2008/465 was approved and the changes pushed as part of bug 6518995 you can now use more a human readable syntax¹:

sd-config-list=
        "ATA     VBOX HARDDISK", "disksort:false";

As it turns out the “disksort”² option along with the thottle-max and throttle-min are the ones I most often want to tune.

Here is the current list of tunables lifted straight from the ARC case.

Thursday August 27, 2009

Someone has posted a script to start a remote xterm on BigAdmin which exposes a number of issues I thought it would be better if google stood some chance of finding a better answer or at least an answer that does not rely on inherently insecure settings.

Remote X applications should be started using ssh -X so that the X traffic is encrypted and if you add -C compressed which can be a significant performance boost. So a script to do this could be handy although to be honest knowing the ssh options or having them set as the default in your .ssh/config is just as easy:

: exdev.eu FSS 31 $; egrep '^(Compress|ForwardX)' ~/.ssh/config
ForwardX11 yes
Compression yes
: exdev.eu FSS 32 $; ssh -f pearson /usr/X11/bin/xterm         
: exdev.eu FSS 33 $; 

or more usefully to start graphical tools:

: exdev.eu FSS 33 $; ssh -f pearson pfexec /usr/sadm/admin/bin/dhcpmgr
: exdev.eu FSS 34 $; 

However if you really want a script to do it here is one that will and no need to mess with your .ssh/config

#!/bin/ksh
REMOTE_PATH=${REMOTE_PATH:-${PATH}}
APP=${0##*/}
if (( $# < 1 )) 
then
        print "USAGE: ${APP} host [args]" >&2
        exit 1
fi
host=$1
shift
exec /usr/bin/ssh -o ClearAllForwardings=yes -C -Xfn $host \
        PATH=${REMOTE_PATH} pfexec ${APP#r} $@

If you save this into a file called “rxterm” then running “rxterm remotehost” will start an xterm on the system remotehost assuming you can ssh to that system.

More entertainingly you can save it as “rdhcpmgr” and it will start the dhcpmgr program on a remote system and securely display it on your current display (assuming your PATH includes /usr/sadm/admin/bin and your profile allows you access to that application). You can use it to start any application by simple naming it after the application in question with a preceding “r”.

Wednesday August 26, 2009

As I have lived with OpenSolaris I've got used to the updates occuring automatically as you would with most modern Operating Systems. What is a real joy is that it creates a new boot environment for the updates so in the event that one was toxic you can always just roll back. It also gives you a handy reference as to how many updates you have done. Number 13 has just happened for me:

cjg@brompton:~$ beadm list
BE               Active Mountpoint Space  Policy Created          
--               ------ ---------- -----  ------ -------          
b4nvidia-bin-fix -      -          86.0K  static 2009-06-06 17:27 
opensolaris-10   -      -          15.68M static 2009-07-18 08:04 
opensolaris-11   -      -          33.73M static 2009-07-26 09:42 
opensolaris-12   N      /          266.5K static 2009-08-24 13:26 
opensolaris-13   R      -          16.42G static 2009-08-26 18:58 
opensolaris-4    -      -          22.19M static 2009-01-30 21:42 
opensolaris-5    -      -          21.30M static 2009-02-25 20:14 
opensolaris-6    -      -          45.87M static 2009-04-10 18:17 
opensolaris-7    -      -          37.83M static 2009-06-01 20:51 
opensolaris-8    -      -          19.03M static 2009-07-02 18:55 
opensolaris-9    -      -          11.56M static 2009-07-10 07:30 
cjg@brompton:~$ 

I'm going to have to bite the bullet on my home server and swith to OpenSolaris soon as the nevada builds stop. Alas with term time approaching I don't think I will be allowed significant down time for a while.

Thursday August 06, 2009

Sometimes in the course of being a system administrator it is useful to know what file systems are being mounted and when and what mounts fail and why. While you can turn on automounter verbose mode that only answers the question for the automounter.

Dtrace makes answering the general question a snip:

: exdev.eu FSS 24 $; cat mount_monitor.d                         
#!/usr/sbin/dtrace -qs

fbt::domount:entry
/ args[1]->dir /
{
        self->dir = args[1]->flags & 0x8 ? args[1]->dir : 
              copyinstr((intptr_t)args[1]->dir);
}
fbt::domount:return
/ self->dir != 0 /
{
        
        printf("%Y domount ppid %d, %s %s pid %d -> %s", walltimestamp, 
              ppid, execname, self->dir, pid, arg1 == 0 ? "OK" : "failed");
}
fbt::domount:return
/ self->dir != 0 && arg1 == 0/
{
        printf("\n");
        self->dir = 0;
}
fbt::domount:return
/ self->dir != 0 && arg1 != 0/
{
        printf("errno %d\n", arg1);
        self->dir = 0;
}
: exdev.eu FSS 25 $; pfexec /usr/sbin/dtrace -qs  mount_monitor.d
2009 Aug  6 12:57:57 domount ppid 0, sched /share/consoles pid 0 -> OK
2009 Aug  6 12:57:59 domount ppid 0, sched /share/chroot pid 0 -> OK
2009 Aug  6 12:58:00 domount ppid 0, sched /share/newsrc pid 0 -> OK
2009 Aug  6 12:58:00 domount ppid 0, sched /share/build2 pid 0 -> OK
2009 Aug  6 12:58:00 domount ppid 0, sched /share/chris_at_play pid 0 -> OK
2009 Aug  6 12:58:00 domount ppid 0, sched /share/ws_eng pid 0 -> OK
2009 Aug  6 12:58:00 domount ppid 0, sched /share/ws pid 0 -> OK
2009 Aug  6 12:58:03 domount ppid 0, sched /home/tx pid 0 -> OK
2009 Aug  6 12:58:04 domount ppid 0, sched /home/fl pid 0 -> OK
2009 Aug  6 12:58:05 domount ppid 0, sched /home/socal pid 0 -> OK
2009 Aug  6 12:58:07 domount ppid 0, sched /home/bur pid 0 -> OK
2009 Aug  6 12:58:23 domount ppid 0, sched /net/e2big.uk/export/install/docs pid 0 -> OK
2009 Aug  6 12:58:23 domount ppid 0, sched /net/e2big.uk/export/install/browser pid 0 -> OK
2009 Aug  6 12:58:23 domount ppid 0, sched /net/e2big.uk/export/install/cdroms pid 0 -> OK
2009 Aug  6 12:59:45 domount ppid 8929, Xnewt /tmp/.X11-pipe/X6 pid 8935 -> OK

In particular that last line if repeated often can give you a clue to things not being right.

Tuesday August 04, 2009

Many databases get backed up by simply stopping the database copying all the data files and then restarting the database. This is fine for things that don't require 24 hour access. However if you are concerned about the time it takes to take the back up then don't do this:

stop_database
cp /data/file1.db .
gzip file1.db
cp /data/file2.db .
gzip file2.db
start_database

Now there are many ways to improve this using ZFS and snapshots being one of the best but if you don't want to go there then at the very least stop doing the “cp”. It is completely pointless. The above should just be:

stop_database
gzip < /data/file1.db > file1.db
gzip < /data/file2.db > file2.db
start_database

You can continue to make it faster by backgrounding those gzips if the system has spare capacity while the back up is running but that is another point. Just stopping those extra copies will make life faster as they are completely unnecessary.

Friday July 31, 2009

Since writing scsi.d I have been pondering if there should really be a scsi dtrace provider that allows you to do all that scsi.d does and more. Since the push of 6797025 that both removed the main reason for not doing this and also gave impetus to do it as scsi.d needed incompatible changes to use the new return function as the return “probe”.

This work is very much work in progress and may or may not see the light of day due to some other issues around scsi addressing, however I thought I would document how I added a kernel dtrace provider so if you want to you don't have to do so much searching¹.

Adding the probes themselves is simplicity itself using the DTRACE_PROBEN() macros. Following the convention I added this macro:

#define	DTRACE_SCSI_2(name, type1, arg1, type2, arg2)			\
	DTRACE_PROBE2(__scsi_##name, type1, arg1, type2, arg2);

to usr/src/uts/common/sys/sdt.h. Then after including <sys/sdt.h> in each file I put this macro in each of the places I wanted my probes:

 	DTRACE_SCSI_2(transport, struct scsi_pkt *, pkt,
 	    struct scsi_address *, P_TO_ADDR(pkt))

The bit that took a while to find was how to turn these into a provider. To do that edit the file “usr/src/uts/common/dtrace/sdt_subr.c” and create the attribute structure²:

 static dtrace_pattr_t scsi_attr = {
 { DTRACE_STABILITY_EVOLVING, DTRACE_STABILITY_EVOLVING, DTRACE_CLASS_ISA },
 { DTRACE_STABILITY_PRIVATE, DTRACE_STABILITY_PRIVATE, DTRACE_CLASS_UNKNOWN },
 { DTRACE_STABILITY_PRIVATE, DTRACE_STABILITY_PRIVATE, DTRACE_CLASS_UNKNOWN },
 { DTRACE_STABILITY_PRIVATE, DTRACE_STABILITY_PRIVATE, DTRACE_CLASS_ISA },
 { DTRACE_STABILITY_EVOLVING, DTRACE_STABILITY_EVOLVING, DTRACE_CLASS_ISA },
 };

and add it to the sdt_providers array:

	{ "scsi", "__scsi_", &scsi_attr, 0 },

than add the probes to the sdt_args array:

	{ "scsi", "transport", 0, 0, "struct scsi_pkt *", "scsi_pktinfo_t *"},
	{ "scsi", "transport", 1, 1, "struct scsi_address *", "scsi_addrinfo_t *"},
	{ "scsi", "complete", 0, 0, "struct scsi_pkt *", "scsi_pktinfo_t *"},
	{ "scsi", "complete", 1, 1, "struct scsi_address *", "scsi_addrinfo_t *"},

Finally you need to create a file containing the definitions of the output structures, scsi_pktinfo_t and scsi_addrinfo_t and define translators for them. That goes into /usr/lib/dtrace and I called mine scsa.d (there is already one called scsi.d).

/*
 * CDDL HEADER START
 *
 * The contents of this file are subject to the terms of the
 * Common Development and Distribution License (the "License").
 * You may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
 *
 * You can obtain a copy of the license at usr/src/OPENSOLARIS.LICENSE
 * or http://www.opensolaris.org/os/licensing.
 * See the License for the specific language governing permissions
 * and limitations under the License.
 *
 * When distributing Covered Code, include this CDDL HEADER in each
 * file and include the License file at usr/src/OPENSOLARIS.LICENSE.
 * If applicable, add the following below this CDDL HEADER, with the
 * fields enclosed by brackets "[]" replaced with your own identifying
 * information: Portions Copyright [yyyy] [name of copyright owner]
 *
 * CDDL HEADER END
 */
/*
 * Copyright 2009 Sun Microsystems, Inc.  All rights reserved.
 * Use is subject to license terms.
 */

#pragma D depends_on module scsi
#pragma D depends_on provider scsi

inline char TEST_UNIT_READY = 0x0;
#pragma D binding "1.0" TEST_UNIT_READY
inline char REZERO_UNIT_or_REWIND = 0x0001;
#pragma D binding "1.0" REZERO_UNIT_or_REWIND

inline char SCSI_HBA_ADDR_COMPLEX = 0x0040;
#pragma D binding "1.0" SCSI_HBA_ADDR_COMPLEX

typedef struct scsi_pktinfo {
	caddr_t pkt_ha_private;
	uint_t	pkt_flags;
	int	pkt_time;
	uchar_t *pkt_scbp;
	uchar_t *pkt_cdbp;
	ssize_t pkt_resid;
	uint_t	pkt_state;
	uint_t 	pkt_statistics;
	uchar_t pkt_reason;
	uint_t	pkt_cdblen;
	uint_t	pkt_tgtlen;
	uint_t	pkt_scblen;
} scsi_pktinfo_t;

#pragma D binding "1.0" translator
translator scsi_pktinfo_t  < struct scsi_pkt *P > {
	pkt_ha_private = P->pkt_ha_private;
	pkt_flags = P->pkt_flags;
	pkt_time = P->pkt_time;
	pkt_scbp = P->pkt_scbp;
	pkt_cdbp = P->pkt_cdbp;
	pkt_resid = P->pkt_resid;
	pkt_state = P->pkt_state;
	pkt_statistics = P->pkt_statistics;
	pkt_reason = P->pkt_reason;
	pkt_cdblen = P->pkt_cdblen;
	pkt_tgtlen = P->pkt_tgtlen;
	pkt_scblen = P->pkt_scblen;
};

typedef struct scsi_addrinfo {
	struct scsi_hba_tran	*a_hba_tran;
	ushort_t a_target;	/* ua target */
	uchar_t	 a_lun;		/* ua lun on target */
	struct scsi_device *a_sd;
} scsi_addrinfo_t;

#pragma D binding "1.0" translator
translator scsi_addrinfo_t  < struct scsi_address *A > {
	a_hba_tran = A->a_hba_tran;
	a_target = !(A->a_hba_tran->tran_hba_flags & SCSI_HBA_ADDR_COMPLEX) ?
		0 : A->a.spi.a_target;
	a_lun = !(A->a_hba_tran->tran_hba_flags & SCSI_HBA_ADDR_COMPLEX) ?
		0 : A->a.spi.a_lun;
	a_sd = (A->a_hba_tran->tran_hba_flags & SCSI_HBA_ADDR_COMPLEX) ?
		A->a.a_sd : 0;
};

again this is just enough to get going so I can see and use the probes:

jack@v4u-2500b-gmp03:~$ pfexec dtrace -P scsi -l
   ID   PROVIDER            MODULE                          FUNCTION NAME
 1303       scsi              scsi                    scsi_transport transport
 1313       scsi              scsi                 scsi_hba_pkt_comp complete
jack@v4u-2500b-gmp03:~$ 

While this all works well for parallel scsi getting the address of devices on fibre is not clear to me. If you have any suggestions I'm all ears.

Friday July 24, 2009

Seeing Katsumi Inoue blogging about Oracle 10g reporting timestamps using the output from gethrtime() reminded me that I have had on occasion wished I had a log to map hrtime to the current time. As Katsumi points out the output of gethrtime() is not absolutely tied to the current time. So there is no way to take the output from it and tell when in real time the output was generated unless you have some reference point. To make things more complex the output is reset each time the system reboots.

For this reason it is useful to keep a file that contains a history of the hrtime and the real time so that any logs can be retrospectively coerced back into a readable format.

There are lots of ways to do this but since on this blog we seem to be in Dtrace mode here is how using dtrace

pfexec /usr/sbin/dtrace -o /var/log/hrtime.log -qn 'BEGIN,tick-1hour,END {
printf("%d:%d.%9.9d:%Y\n",
        timestamp, walltimestamp/1000000000,
        walltimestamp%1000000000, walltimestamp);
}'

Then you get a nice file that contains three columns. The hrtime, the time in seconds since January 1^st 1970 and a human readable representation of the time in the current timezone:

: s4u-10-gmp03.eu TS 39 $; cat /var/log/hrtime.log    
5638545510919736:1248443226.350000625:2009 Jul 24 14:47:06
5642145449325180:1248446826.279995332:2009 Jul 24 15:47:06

I have to confess however that using Dtrace for this does not feel right, not least as you need to be root for this to be reliable and also the C code is trivial to write, compile and run from cron and send the output to syslog:

: exdev.eu FSS 39 $; cat  ./gethrtime_base.c
#include <sys/time.h>
#include <stdio.h>

int
main(int argc, char **argv)
{
	hrtime_t hrt = gethrtime();
	struct timeval tv;
	gettimeofday(&tv, NULL);

	printf("%lld:%d.%6.6d:%s", hrt, tv.tv_sec, tv.tv_usec,
			ctime(&tv.tv_sec));
}
: exdev.eu FSS 40 $; make ./gethrtime_base
cc    -o gethrtime_base gethrtime_base.c 
: exdev.eu FSS 41 $;  ./gethrtime_base
11013365852133078:1248444379.163215:Fri Jul 24 15:06:19 2009
: exdev.eu FSS 42 $; 
./gethrtime_base | logger -p daemon.notice -t hrtime
: exdev.eu FSS 43 $;  tail -10 /var/adm/messages | grep hrtime
Jul 24 15:32:33 exdev hrtime: [ID 702911 daemon.notice] 11014939896174861:1248445953.109855:Fri Jul 24 15:32:33 2009
Jul 24 16:09:21 exdev hrtime: [ID 702911 daemon.notice] 11017148054584749:1248448161.131675:Fri Jul 24 16:09:21 2009
: exdev.eu FSS 50 $; 

Wednesday July 22, 2009

As I cycled home I realised there was one more thing I could do on the exploring the limits of threads and processes on Solaris. That would be the highest load average ever. Modifying the thread creator program to not have each thread sleep once started but instead wait until all the threads were set up and then go into an infinite compute loop that should get me the highest load average possible on a system or so you would think.

With 784001 threads the load stabilised at:

10:16am  up 18:07,  2 users,  load average: 22114.50, 22022.68, 21245.781

Which was somewhat disappointing. However an earlier run with just 780,000 threads managed to peak the load at 1,784,593 while it was exiting:

 7:44am  up 15:35,  2 users,  load average: 1724593.79, 477392.80, 188985.10

I' still pondering how 780000 thread can result in a load average of more than 1 million.

Sunday July 19, 2009

After the surprise interest in the maximum number of processes on a system it seems rude not to try and see how many threads I can squeeze into a single process while I have access to a system where physical memory will not be the limiting factor. The expectation is that this will closely match the number of processes as each thread will have an LWP in the kernel which will in turn consume the segkp.

A slight modification to the forker program:

: exdev.eu FSS 62 $; cat thr_creater.c
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <thread.h>

int
main(int argc, char **argv)
{
        pid_t pid;
        int count=0;
        while(count < (argc != 2 ? 100 : atoi(argv[1])) &&
            (pid = thr_create(NULL, 0, (void * (*)(void *))pause,
            NULL, THR_DETACHED, NULL)) != -1) {
                if (pid == 0 ) {
                        /* Success, ) */
                        if (count % 1000 == 0)
                                printf("%d\n", count);
                        count++;
                }
        }
        if (pid < 0)
                perror("fork");
        printf("%d\n", count);
        pause();
}

and this time it has to be built as a 64 bit program:

# make "CFLAGS=-m64 -mt" thr_creater
#

Here is how it went:

$; ./thr_creater 1000000        
0
1000
2000
3000
4000
5000
6000
7000
8000
9000
10000
11000
12000
13000
14000
15000
.....
782000
783000
784000

Here things have stopped and for some bizarre reason attaching a debugger to see what is going on does not seem to be a good idea. I had prstat running in another window and it reported:

  2336 cg13442  7158M 7157M cpu73    0    0   1:42:59 1.6% thr_creater/784970

Which is just a few more threads than I got processes (784956) when running in multi user. However at this point the system is pretty much a warm brick as if I exit any process thr_creater hoovers up the process so I can create no more. Fortunately I had realized this would happen and had some sleep(1) processes running so I could pause the thr_creater and then kill one of the sleeps to allow me to run a command:

$; ps -o pid,vsz,rss,nlwp,comm -p 2336
   PID  VSZ  RSS NLWP COMMAND
  2336 7329704 7329248 784972 ./thr_creater

as you can see it managed to get another two threads created since the prstat exited.

Saturday July 18, 2009

I've just straightened the rear wheel on the bike of a friend of my daughter and while I was at it checked over the rest of the bike. This leads to my top tip for parents of children who cycle (which IMO should be every parent of an able bodied child).

Before you start worrying about whether your child is or is not wearing a helmet¹ make sure that the brakes on their bike work. Not just when the bike is new but regularly.